The Birther conspiracy: white America’s racist fantasy
The ‘birthers’, no name could be more misleading for a group of people who want to be taken seriously about their beliefs, but there is nothing serious, logical or reasonable about people who believe that Barack Obama was born in a country outside the CONUS. If you suggest to people that the idea of questioning the birth circumstances of America’s first non-white president has more than a whiff of racism about it, they get defensive. Some may even claim that you’re ‘obsessed’ with race and that ‘everything’ you say is ‘about race’. But such beliefs – for this is what they are – are also an exercise of denial on the part of the ‘birther’, who is as likely as not to dismiss you as a ‘sheeple’ if you refuse or refute their ‘truths’.
It is undeniable that the language of racism has changed a great deal since the 1970s and racists themselves are conscious of a need to speak in words that aren’t necessarily directly related to what Fanon (1986) called ‘melanism’; a classificatory practice that is based on pseudo-scientific notions of biological difference and characterised by the outward marker of skin colour. Therefore the more ideologically-inclined of their number will resort to purely economic language to circumlocute the subject of discourse. For example, there is a belief on the part of a particular group within the American libertarian right that Jim Crow should have continued because, in their eyes, denying the rights of white Americans to deny African-Americans access to a variety of socio-economic activities was a refusal of white freedoms. This was America’s apartheid that was rationalized in similar terms to South Africa by British apologists (The Freedom Association, for example) for the latter’s racist regime.
The fixation that some people have with Obama’s circumstances of birth is doubtlessly predicated on a racist trope: namely that blacks are not full citizens of the United States. This belief has its origins in slavery when blacks were the property of their masters. Even free blacks (and, indeed, Indians) were not considered citizens: they could not vote and were barred from holding public office. When African-Americans were enfranchised at the end of the Civil War, they continued to be denied the vote in the former Confederate states through the means of pseudo-legalistic mechanisms like The Grandfather clause or the Poll Tax. The former was enacted at the biological level and the latter was exercised economically. It took further Federal legislation to force change on the southern states. Even so, the question of who is allowed to be American and who is not persists with certain sections of the American right.
Like suspicious software that can be downloaded on the Internet, the birther narrative often comes bundled with other dubious narratives that tend to orbit other unpleasant and sometimes hidden discourses, some of which may be related to discredited tracts like The Protocols and bizarre notions about lizards-in-human-form. Wherever you find a site about World Financial Conspiracies, you will also find an abundance of birther material. Those who choose to believe these conspiracy theories appear to be substituting one form of extreme religious belief for another.
Recently, I have found myself having to deal with conspiracy theorists on Facebook and elsewhere. I have tried to use logic and examples from history in an attempt to get them to think critically about their beliefs but, as anyone who has dealt with cultists will recognize, this is an impossible task. The ‘Birther’ conspiracies are some of the most vile racist ideas to have been propagated since The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. When I point out to CT’s that these notions were produced by racist discourses, the reply that I get from them is “I’m not a racist”. But if you’re not a racist, then why do you subscribe to racist discourses? They have no answer. It’s like saying to a born-again Christian that praying achieves nothing; all you are doing is refusing responsibility for your life and your actions – or lack of them.
The way in which the birther conspiracy has morphed over the course of the last few years demonstrates the CT’s slipshod grasp of reality. First, they claimed Obama’s birth certificated was “forged” and that he was, in fact, a Muslim who was born in either Kenya (his father’s place of birth) or Indonesia (his stepfather’s place of birth). Even Obama’s church-going wasn’t enough for these people, who fail to understand that if a Muslim goes into a church and partakes in its rituals, that person would be considered an apostate. To this, the CT’s claimed that Obama was also a “Marxist”. But if that were true, why did he bail out the banks? Why hasn’t Obama created a proper Marxist economy instead of attempting to patch up a fatally-wounded capitalist economic system? Again, the CT cannot produce a coherent reply and instead, falls back on tropes. ‘Obamacare’, they scream. When it is pointed out to them that the biggest opponents of universal healthcare are big pharma and the medical insurance companies, both of whom have an interest in producing scare stories, there is no reply, just more of the same gibberish about people having chips implanted into their bodies or nanites being injected into their bloodstreams. It’s the stuff of dystopian science fiction.
More recently, CTs have claimed that Obama, who shortened his first name to the more English-sounding “Barry” in his youth, renounced his US citizenship when his mother married Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian. The CTs claim that he applied for a Fulbright Scholarship at Occidental College under the name ‘Barry Soetoro’, yet the college has no record of this and, even if Obama had taken his stepfather’s surname, it’s hardly unusual or surprising. It happens all the time. Naturally, CTs will then claim that Obama “ordered the college to destroy any records”. When you ask them to produce evidence to support this claim, guess what happens? Not much. Just more incoherent babble. In fact, when Obama visited Ireland to connect with his Irish roots, I Gaelicized his name to Bairre Ó Beámagh for a laugh. I don’t doubt that he has Irish ancestors. I, too, have Irish and Scottish ancestors. There is no such thing as pure ethnicity and even those white racists who talk about the “indigenous British” have no idea what they’re talking about because this is an island nation of immigrants and invaders.
The most revealing thing about the birther conspiracy is that Black people don’t buy into it. It is supported entirely by whites. Furthermore, Obama is not actually black, he is of mixed parentage and as those people who are of mixed parentage will tell you, they’re always being questioned on their origins. For example I have been referred to to variously as ‘Arab’ or ‘Pakistani’, although I am neither. People will make up things about you if they are blind or foolish enough to buy into the superficialities of skin colour as a marker of a person’s identity and/or culture. This ethnic purism is undoubtedly racist. To this end, the Obama birth conspiracy was concocted by white racists who couldn’t come to terms with the fact that a man who is not white is now President of the United States.
The conspiracy theory is quickly supplanting religion as a belief system. The followers of conspiracy theories are highly devoted to their beliefs and blinded by their faith in questionable ideas. They are unable or unwilling to interrogate the sources that they frequently cite and accept any information so long as it accords with their beliefs. Unwittingly CTs produce a confirmation bias that is endlessly looped in their mind. In fact, it is the only voice they hear.
One subject that tends to occupy the minds of the halfwits who leave comments on Telegraph blogs is Barack Obama. These self-styled ‘birthers’ can’t quite believe that the President of the United States is a man with brown skin. Obama’s parentage has been the subject of countless racist conspiracy theories. “He’s a Muslim”, “He’s a communist”, ” “He was born on Mars”.
Like I’ve said many times on this blog I’m not a fan of Obama. He’s shown time and time again that he’s little different to all the other US presidents, especially when it comes to bombing the world’s brown people.
Normally it’s Nile Gardiner who’s obsessed with Obama. If you look at his blogs over the course of the last five years, you will see that most of them are about Obama and how he “hates Britain” or some such nonsense. Thursday, it was the turn of Doc Stanley to provide pieces of rotting meat for the slavering hordes of racists.
Ayers reveals how he has navigated the challenges and triumphs of this public life with steadfastness and a dash of good humor—from the red carpet at the Oscars, to prison vigils and airports (where he is often detained and where he finally “confesses” that he did write Dreams from My Father).
What?! He confesses that he wrote Barack Obama’s best-selling memoir Dreams from My Father? Making Obama not just a bad president but a fraud, too? It was too much to disbelieve for some on the Right, with Investors.com walking into the trap and Rush Limbaugh following behind, both headlining that Ayers had exposed himself as the original author.
That was enough to get extreme headbangers like “Lord Howard Hurts” to leave this coiled-up present on The Doc’s dreadful blog.
This demand to see Obama’s birth certificate is predicated on nothing less than racism. As I’ve pointed out before on this blog: John McCain, who was born outside the United States was never subjected to this kind of demand. Why? Because he’s white. “Lord Arse Hurts” now also claims that Obama’s parents weren’t who they claimed to be. Again this is based on racist notions of racial purity.
I had a look at “Lord Arse’s” blog, which he has laughing titled “freedomfiles” and the language used is characteristically violent. It’s exactly the sort of thing that you’d expect from a Tea Party supporting, gun-toting, racist shit-kicker who lurvs his country.
The survival of America and this great Republic will not be found in the empty rhetoric of political ‘sing song‘ given us by the likes of President B.H. Obama or Hillary ‘my daughter and I were under fire in Bosnia‘ Clinton, or any current RINO pretender. We are currently on the edge of a Civil War between the races precisely because President B.H. Obama has so divided this nation along the lines of race and personal responsibility that the freedoms so long ago won through blood, sweat, and tears, is fast coming to an inglorious end. Unless actions are taken by concerned Patriots the collapse into complete socialism will be upon us.
This talk of being “on the edge of Civil War” reminds me of the kind of language used by self-styled British ‘patriots’ who constantly talk of ‘treason’, ‘genocide’ and ‘race replacement’. “Lord Arse” also believes that he and his ilk are the only people who understand “freedom”. Yet if this person actually bothered to do any research instead of relying wholly on myths, he would see that the “freedom” of which he writes was limited to a certain class of people. Indians and Blacks had no freedom and women couldn’t vote. The working classes were shot and killed when they organized and agitated for better working conditions. “Lord Arse” may talk about “freedom” but he and his class work tirelessly to deny others of their freedoms. In other words, he talks out of his arse.
Nile Gardiner: obsessive and paranoid. He could give Dr Strangelove’s General Jack D Ripper a run for his money.
There are two words that I’d use to describe Moonie Nile Gardiner. One is paranoid, the other is obsessive. He can only write blogs about two things: The Falkland Islands and Barack Obama. Sometimes…well, most of the time, he combines his two obsessions into a single blog.
Until Mitt Romney’s defeat last November, Gardiner was one of Mitt’s mutts. His brief was to brief Romney on foreign affairs. He did a pretty poor job of it too. Now he’s back to his day job as the Director of The Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom (sic), a subdivision of the extreme right-wing Heritage Foundation.
In the last month, I’ve lost count of the number of Gardiner’s blogs that mention or feature Obama and The Falklands. It’s clear that he desperately wants some kind of confrontation between Britain and Argentina. He’s nostalgic for the glory days of 1982 and he doesn’t really mind if people get killed just as long as the Falklanders maintain their dubious ‘sovereignty’.
Sir Peter Westmacott, the veteran British Ambassador to Washington, has an excellent piece in Politico today in advance of the Falklands referendum which is taking place on March 10 and 11. Aimed squarely at US policymakers, the article outlines why Argentina’s claims over the Falklands are unfounded, and why the future of the Falkland Islands must be decided by the inhabitants of the Islands themselves. It is a clear-cut case of self-determination. As Sir Peter writes, invoking the spirit of the American Declaration of Independence:
My bold. He’s got this all wrong. How on earth can he compare the Falklands – a British colony Overseas Territory in the South Atlantic – to the 12 states that rejected British rule in 1776? His understanding of history is faulty. Here’s what the ambassador wrote,
The Argentine government claims sovereignty over the islands based on events that took place more than 180 years ago when the archipelago was little more than an isolated outpost with almost no permanent population. But according to the most fundamental principles of international law, accepted by all nations for the past 60 years, it is for the inhabitants of a territory alone to determine how they are governed — the fundamental principle of self-determination, which received its most eloquent expression in Philadelphia in 1776.
… Kirchner and her government seek to portray the Falklands’ status as an example of British colonialism. But what could be more colonialist than seeking control of a territory — over which you have never exercised sovereignty and which your country accepted was British more than 160 years ago — against the wishes of the people who lived there?
Britain, as it has done so many times, stole the islands from under the noses of the nascent Argentina. The islands were formally colonized by Britain in 1840. But the word “colonialism”, which has been used by Cristina Kirchner, is contested by Gardiner and his buddy, Westmacott. But the facts speak for themselves: the Falklands are one of the last vestiges of British colonialism along with the troublesome Pitcairn Islands and tax havens like the Cayman Islands. The title “British Overseas Territories” is highly misleading because these territories are colonies in all but name; their inhabitants are considered British citizens but have no political representation in the ‘mother’ country as is the case with French overseas territories or DOM-TOM. Most of these overseas territories have strategic value or are located adjacent to some natural resource or other. Hence the reason why they remain British.
But what about this referendum? Isn’t it a foregone conclusion that the Falklanders will vote to remain, er, ‘British’? So what’s the point of it? It’s simple: Britain or, at least, the Tories and perhaps UKIP, want to rattle sabres with Argentina. Both parties are nostalgic for the long-dead British Empire and both parties gush over the memory of Thatcher’s triumph over the beastly Argies.
As readers of this blog will know, the Obama administration has a long track record of knifing Britain in the back over the Falklands issue. It has consistently sided with Cristina Kirchner’s calls for negotiations between London and Buenos Aires over the sovereignty of the Falklands, and will not recognise the right to self-determination of the Falkland Islanders. The Obama White House and State Department have refused to condemn the Kirchner regime’s campaign of intimidation against the Falklands, a self-governing British Overseas Territory in the South Atlantic, including the boarding of fishing vessels bearing the Falklands flag, and threats to mount a naval blockade.
“The Obama administration has a long track record of knifing Britain in the back over the Falklands issue”? The Obama administration has only been in place a little over 4 years. But here’s a question: how has Kirchner “intimidated” the Falklanders? He does not say. Knowing Gardiner, as I do, I would suggest that he’s come over all dramatic like a pantomime dame. I urge you to look at the blog title. It’s typically hysterical.
He provides a video produced by The Heritage Foundation… well, there’s a surprise.
The narrative advanced by this video ignores the fact that sovereignty over the islands has always been disputed. The reason why Britain colonized the Falklands was because of sealing and whaling. Both animals provided oil for lighting, heating and domestic products. Now oil of a different kind has been found offshore.
David Cameron needs to look to the Iron Lady, and not Barack Obama, for inspiration if he is to have any hope of winning in 2015. A conservative party can only win if it sticks to conservative values. Otherwise it becomes an empty shell that succeeds only in alienating its own base and destroying its very identity.
Ridiculous. Nurse! This one keeps thrashing about!
The day before Eastleigh, the ever-paranoid and shrill Gardiner tells us that Obama’s presidency is “A nasty, brutish, imperial presidency”. So why is that, Nile?
Thomas Hobbes wrote that the life of man is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Today’s White House definitely isn’t poor, lavishly feeding off the wealth of the American taxpayer, and the current presidency certainly isn’t short, with nearly four more years to run. But it is undeniably nasty and brutish, as veteran Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward has found after questioning President Obama’s narrative on the sequester issue.
A quote from Hobbes? Great. Just what we needed. There’s more,
Woodward, one of two reporters who broke the Watergate story that led to Richard Nixon’s downfall (immortalised in the 1976 Oscar winner All The President’s Men), has revealed to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that the White House warned him that he would “regret” his recent remarks on the sequester, made in a Washington Post column. (Read the exchange of emails between White House economic adviser Gene Sperling and Woodward posted by Politico here.) Woodward is hardly a conservative, and has been at the heart of the liberal media establishment for decades. He is, however, not afraid of challenging the status quo, as he did with his 2010 book Obama’s Wars. Woodward is not alone. Lanny Davis, another liberal columnist and former special counsel to Bill Clinton, who has penned several pieces critical of Obama’s policies, has also spoken out against similar White House tactics.
So Bush’s presidency, in which the PATRIOT Act was enacted, doesn’t count?
We get to the point of the blog towards the end,
Will American liberals now stand up to the Obama White House and condemn its blatant attempts to suppress criticism and free speech? I doubt it. The Washington Post has provided relatively little coverage of the story, despite the fact that one its own star writers has been targeted.The New York Times is, unsurprisingly, completely silent (with the exception of a small mention in a single blog) on the issue. Ironically, most of the reporting of the White House’s attempts to intimidate liberal critics has come from the conservative press, led by the Drudge Report, which has propelled the story to national prominence. Both conservatives and liberals should be rallying to the defence of free speech and freedom of the press, holding the Obama presidency to account. All Americans should be concerned by government attempts to stifle press criticism in the land of the free, tactics which undermine the very foundations of liberty.
The first sentence of this paragraph reminds me of Louise Mensch’s outburst on Twitter when she demanded that the Labour Party condemn those who wished Thatcher dead. It’s a right-wing trick designed to claim moral authority over their opponents.
Now I’m not a fan of Obama but I find Gardiner’s fascination with him bizarre to the point of being pathological. He’s a cheerleader for war, death and destruction. His idea of freedom, like that of The Freedom Association, is Orwellian.
Mitt Romney lost the presidential election. Gardiner is still bitter that his man choked it. Now he spends his days churning out blog after blog about Obama. He also has the Falklands to use as a stick to smash his favourite target over the head. Obama will be in the White House for four years, but I suspect Gardiner will still write blogs about him long after he is gone.
Obama won the election and the Moonie is angry… and bitter. I found this on the English version of Die Welt.
… Nile Gardiner, of conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, does not believe that the Republicans’ defeat is of great significance, since they still have the power to stymie the president’s bills. He points out that the new generation of Republicans, like Florida senator Marco Rubio, are just as conservative as the old. “So you’re not going to see the Republicans shifting to the left but maintaining their core conservative principles,” said. He also believes that the Tea Party will continue to have a lot of influence.
He’s in denial. The Republicans have to change. Gardiner’s idea of a conservative is something akin to a Falangist (I’m stopping short of fascist). Indeed, the Republicans have slid so far to the right that any party that is slightly less right-wing is seen as “left” or “socialist”. In truth, the Tea Party’s influence scuppered any real chance Romney had, because by associating with them, he became their hostage to such an extent that he developed Stockholm Syndrome. But the Republicans can’t see it. Here’s some more from The Moonie.
“So far there isn’t any evidence that he is willing to be bipartisan,” he warned.
Gardiner also argued that though Obama is politically further left than the country as a whole, he will still be a “lame duck president.” And he adds that Obama will struggle to pass his immigration reform proposal. “I don’t see any Republican appetite for immigration reform,” he said.
If Obama is “left-wing” and a “socialist”, then I’m a Tory grandee. He’ll continue to kill civilians in drone strikes and protect capitalist interests. That’s what he does. The Affordable Healthcare Act, dubbed “Obamacare”, will continue to exercise Republican emotions. And the Birthers and Truthers? Well, they’ll keep dribbling conspiranoid fantasies. The world still turns.
Let’s have a look at some of his tweets.
His Torygraph stablemate, James Delingpole, chimes in with some poorly thought out bollocks about Greece and the EU. Notice how Gardiner also retweeted some bullshit article from The Washington Times. Now correct me if I’m wrong, but haven’t plenty of Republican presidents sucked up to “overseas authoritarians”? Do the names Nixon, Pinochet and Suharto mean anything? Well, not to Gardiner, because he’s the Director of the Orwellian Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, whose raison d’etre is not freedom but serfdom for those who aren’t billionaire industrialists or bankers.
Let’s have a look at that Wash Timesarticle. Here’s the opening paragraph.
The Russians, Chinese and Iranians would vote for Barack Obama. That’s a good reason for Americans to select someone else.
Oh, very bitchy. Let’s read on.
Polls and informal surveys from around the world show that if foreigners could vote in the U.S. election, President Obama would win hands down. “The One” may have lost some of the luster he had four years ago, when simply showing up was good enough for him to land a Nobel Peace Prize, but he’s still popular overseas. That’s because many countries resent a robust White House, and adversary states chafe when their designs are foiled by American might. Mr. Obama is the perfect president for both factions. His diminutive stature on the global scene incites no envy among our friends and offers frequent opportunities to our adversaries.
Paranoia alert! Curiously enough, this article has no by-line and it’s entirely possible that it was written by the chubby-cheeked one.
Over at the Torygraph, Brendan O’Neill claims that Obama’s victory is a win for the “elitists”. It’s a typically confused piece that argues the President’s campaign was not so much supported by “Joe Averages” as it was by
“the tech sector, government and the academy” – his top five funders were “the University of California, Microsoft, Google, the US government, and Harvard”. Executives at Craigslist, Facebook and Google gave maximum donations to Obama’s campaign.
O’Neill’s argument is drawn from an article by Joel Kotkin at the Daily Beast. Tell us something we don’t know, Brendan. Big business supports the Democrats. It’s hardly earth-shattering stuff.
The challenge for the Tea Party is to return to its fiscal roots and try to shake off some of the bad memories of this election year. It’s interesting to note that House candidates supported by Ron Paul – who peddles a less culturally toxic brand of libertarianism – did rather well. Is Paulism the future?
Ah, so now the Doc has become a Paulician? Yeah, I know what a Paulician is, I’ve just appropriated the name. Dig? I love how Stanley casts off Romney like a beat-up mac and slips into his new Ron Paul cape and boots. No one wants to be seen with a loser. Good luck with that one too, Doc. As for Paul’s [coughs] libertarianism being “less toxic”, that’s just nuts. He’s a racist. Remember?
A depressing election fact for the Republican party constitutes something of a warning for Labour. According to exit polls, a significant majority of US voters still blame George Bush for the economic crisis. In other words, they continue to hold the party which was in power at the time responsible for the 2008 crash and its lingering consequences. Angry commentators on the American Right are attributing this to the White House spin operation which has never failed to pin it all on the Bush administration even as its own goals for economic recovery were repeatedly missed.
There’s no mention of Romney or the Tea Party in her blog. Instead, she tries to comfort herself with the fantasy of Labour being trounced at the next general election by the Conservatives… who are currently demonstrating how economically illiterate they are, while doling out NHS contracts to their business chums. You keep taking the drugs, Janet but I don’t think they’re working.
And what about the zombie-eyed granny-starver, Paul Ryan? Hopefully he’ll disappear back up his own arse.
It’s the sound of Moonie, Nile Gardiner sobbing his wee heart out as Mitt Romney loses the Presidential Election to Barack Obama.
I guess it’s back to penning outraged blogs about how Churchill’s bust no longer sits in the Oval Office and how Obama is allowing Argentina to “insult” Britain. He’ll also find the time to complain that Obama hasn’t visited “our friend and ally” Israel.
Gardiner still hasn’t said anything about Sun Myung Moon’s death. The silence, as they say, is deafening.
Donald Trump is a nasty piece of work. If anyone saw the film You’ve Been Trumped on BBC2 the other week, you’ll know that the billionaire property developer purchased land in Aberdeenshire with the intention of building one of his luxury resorts. The site that he purchased was identified as a Site of Special Scientific Interest. Those that lived nearby were harassed and their homes described as “slums” by Da Don, a man who’s used to getting his own way by simply waving his wedge about. There are also serious allegations that Trump regarded Grampian Police as his private security team and has been putting them under pressure to act. Does he get away with this shit in Noo York? Probably.
Trump is a bit like a Mafia don but without the garottes, knuckledusters, violin cases and pretensions to a Sicilian heritage. He’s a plastic don. He’s got the dynasty – da family. His hair, often resembling a mutated piece of shredded wheat, attracts ridicule and bafflement the world over. He’s got the money (but is it real or just debt?) and influence. But it’s his claims to have access to a special kind of truth that has been attracting the most ridicule, especially on Twitter.
Let’s be clear about this: demands to see Obama’s birth certificate or any other document smells suspiciously, in The Cat’s view, of crypto-racism. In other words, it’s the sort of racism that does its best to deny its true nature by claiming to be something else. That can be either a concern for the ‘truth’ or an economic rationalization (see the classical liberals’ arguments about Jim Crow and segregation). Questions of one’s birth were, rather curiously, absent in the case of John McCain, who was born outside the Continental United States in the Panama Canal Zone, which was not, at that time, an incorporated territory. McCain is white, therefore his citizenship was never in question as far as the Tea Partiers and assorted conspiranoids are concerned. On that basis, McCain should have been disqualified on the grounds that he was born outside of the United States. Even those born of US service personnel overseas are barred from running for the presidency. Is that fair? Well, not really. But those are rules.
The discourses of citizenship and national identity are often deployed by the right, nationalists especially, to question the right of those persons of a particular ethnicity or culture to live in, what they see as, ‘their’ country. Therefore such discourses almost always contain the hidden and unpleasant discourse of racism. In Trump’s case, it’s fine for Black people to be athletes and boxers, but President of the United States? Not in Trump’s world! The word that springs to mind, but which Trump did not say, is “uppity”, which is always attached to the other word. The one that begins with the letter, “N”.
If you haven’t seen You’ve Been Trumped, here’s the trailer. The film may still be on BBC iPlayer.
Trump recently announced that he would donate $5 million to charity if Obama showed him his college records. I’ll show you mine, if you show me yours! Ooer, missus! The Mambo rips into The Man with the Mystery Hair here.
The Normans: they came, they saw, they conquered and later intermarried with the locals.
When it was announced that Mitt Romney was to visit the UK, Israel and Poland, I suspected that Nile Gardiner was involved in drawing up the itinerary for the Presidential hopeful. It has his dirty fingerprints all over it. How can I tell? Well, if you Google “Nile Gardiner Poland”, for example, you will see that the top three links are Gardiner’s Torygraph blogs. Now try Googling “Nile Gardiner Israel” and you will get similar results. But the visit to Britain has not gone as well as planned and a remark made by Romney about the Olympics sparked off a bout of transatlantic mudslinging.
And where do these characteristics have their roots? In Anglo-Saxon civilisation. When a Romney aide told this newspaper that the US and Britain shared an ‘Anglo-Saxon heritage’, he or she was stating the obvious. Those Lefties pretending to be upset – the Obama campaign called the remark ‘stunningly offensive’ – know perfectly well that the reference was cultural rather than racial. When the French talk of ‘les anglo-saxons’ or the Spanish of ‘los anglosajones’, they don’t mean Cerdic and Oswine and Æthelstan. They mean people who speak English and believe in small government.
I love how Hannan excuses Romney by saying, ” the reference was cultural rather than racial”. But then, he would say that. He would defend Satan, given half the chance. He also deliberately ignores the way in which the phrase is often used to claim that Obama isn’t “white” and to make the spurious point that he does not understand the mythological ‘ties that bind’ the two English-speaking countries.
The fact of the matter is that this country was invaded by the Normans in 1066. the Anglo-Saxons and the other peoples who inhabited this island were over-run and forced to accept the invaders as their conquerors and overlords. Over time, the Normans intermarried with the locals (after brutalizing them). That makes this country as much Norman as it does Anglo-Saxon. Of course, the fact that large swathes of this country were occupied by the Danes (Danelaw) as well as the Romans before them doesn’t seem to matter much to the racists and crypto-racists that clutter the Internet. They declare themselves to be Anglo-Saxon, even though a simple DNA test would reveal something startlingly different.
Here’s the offending remark that was made by the ‘unnamed advisor’,
“We are part of an Anglo-Saxon heritage, and he feels that the special relationship is special,” the adviser said of Mr. Romney, adding: “The White House didn’t fully appreciate the shared history we have.”
Ah, the shared history and the transatlantic bruderschaft. This is odd because from the American War of Independence in 1776 to the period immediately after WWII, Britain was on the US’s shit-list. In fact the US and Britain came close to going to war with one another in 1895 over a small strip of land between Venezuela and British Guyana. The US even planned to have a war with Britain as recently as 1930.
So who produced this extraordinary piece of ahistorical tosh? Like me, Gideon Rachmann of the FT has his suspicions,
Suspicion swiftly fell on Nile Gardiner, a Brit who works at the Heritage Foundation and has been named as one of Romney’s foreign-policy advisory team. Gardiner blogs for the Telegraph and has admitted speaking to the Telegraph journalist who wrote the story – but, despite strong circumstantial evidence, denied being the source of the quote.
As we know, Gardiner isn’t shy when it comes to making comments that can be construed as racist. He has plenty of previous. On this occasion he denies it but then, he would.
This article from TMP is rather interesting, especially for the last paragraph.
My other reason for being interested in this is something my friend Mike Lind always had a good way of capturing — which is the way that on the American right, Brits, particularly conservative Brits, amount to something like Americans by proxy. Sure, they don’t carry US citizenship. But by possessing the ur-Anglo-Saxon-ness and the heritage thing and the stiff upper lip and some Great Books rearing they’re practically more American than we are. Sort of like the yeast that makes the bread. So a Brit like Nile Gardiner is sort of more one of us — at least in some Platonic ideal form — than the Mexican-American son of immigrants in San Diego or Los Angeles. And certainly he might get the centrality of our Anglo-Saxon heritage more than someone like Barack Obama who’s the son of a Kenyan and born in Hawaii and even spent time as a kid living in Indonesia.
But all that aside, is Nile Gardiner an American citizen?
My bold. No he isn’t but that doesn’t mean that he’s particularly au fait with what’s happening in the UK either, as I point out in this blog.
But it’s misleading to describe the folkways and political traditions that Americans inherited from Britain as “Anglo-Saxon”. For the most part, they date back no further than the 16th century, when British life was redefined by the Reformation and the beginnings of capitalism.
The Anglo-Saxons, on the other hand, were Germanic tribes who lived in Britain after about the 5th century. Although not eliminated, their language (Old English) and political institutions were transformed by the Norman conquest in 1066. Calling the early modern traditions that connected the United States and Britain in the colonial period “Anglo-Saxon” is a little like calling the calling the Pope the pontifex maximus. There’s a sense in which it’s true, but too much history separates the two eras for the comparison to be useful.
Quite.
What we have here is a very sly way of playing the race card. The suggestion is that Obama is not “Anglo-Saxon” is another way of saying he isn’t white and therefore doesn’t understand the ‘Special Relationship’. This, of course, isn’t true and as we all know, Obama is mixed race. But Gardiner and his chums on the Torygraph favour the One-Drop Rule. If you have a one black parent, grandparent or great-grandparent, then you are black; an Other.
Furthermore, Moonie Gardiner has been involved in an anti-Obama smear campaign since the President took office. Not a week passes by when he hasn’t written a blog that complains of Obama’s insensitivity towards this and that. The fact that Gardiner denies making the comment means nothing. It’s his modus operandi. Those are his words.
Ron Paul, right libertarian, racist, anti-Semite and conspiracy theorist
A lot of right libertarians love to talk about freedom. They love to tell us how their ‘libertarianism’ will make us happier. “Greed is natural and greed is good” is the motto by which they live their lives. They also love to talk about how they want to abolish institutions that work to promote greater understanding and equality. The suggestion put forth by the right libertarian is that the ‘invisible hand’ of the ‘free market’ will eliminate racism. It’s not only laughable. It’s a myth. Especially when so many right libertarians harbour deep-seated prejudices.
Scratch the surface of some of these ‘libertarians’ and you’ll often find some questionable attitudes to difference underneath. Their attitudes are almost always shrouded in economic dogma and masked by cold, matter-of-fact business-speak. For example the lunch counter protests in the South were retroactively opposed on the grounds of “trespass”. They also argue that businesses should be permitted to refuse someone on the basis of skin colour. It is for these reasons that soi-disant libertarians claimed to oppose the civil rights movement. Ron Paul, whose soubriquet is “Dr No”, has earned a reputation among right libertarians as “principled”. He is often lauded on TheTelegraph’s blogs and hailed elsewhere as a true ‘libertarian’. A commenter on Hannan’s blog says,
Ron Paul seems to be ignored by the British media. In the U.S. he also gets a raw deal. A recent CNN poll had him rated at
0%. It turned out that they had polled just 50 people.
This reads like a lament but the commenter does not connect the lament with lived experience. Furthermore this commenter wilfully ignores Paul’s racist and anti-Semitic remarks. In 2008 CNN reported that,
A series of newsletters in the name of GOP presidential hopeful Ron Paul contain several racist remarks — including one that says order was restored to Los Angeles after the 1992 riots when blacks went “to pick up their welfare checks.”
Hannan is a self-declared admirer of Paul, whom he describes as an “honest principled patriot” (see the comments). There’s no mention of his racism and that is no surprise. It’s much easier to elide something as inconvenient as Paul’s racism and talk movingly about his ‘honesty’. We’ll return to Hannan later. Paul may deny it but there are still many doubts over his protestations of innocence. Is it because he doth protest too much? CNN again,
The controversial newsletters include rants against the Israeli lobby, gays, AIDS victims and Martin Luther King Jr. — described as a “pro-Communist philanderer.” One newsletter, from June 1992, right after the LA riots, says “order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks.”
Twice-failed Presidential wannabe Ron Paul’s racism is never far from the surface and reappeared Friday when he admitted to MSNBC’s Chris Matthews that he would not have voted for the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 if he had been in Congress at the time.
Despite its nefarious history, Ron Paul has been a longtime supporter and friend of the John Birch Society, speaking as they keynote speaker at their 50th anniversary and holding rallies with them. Like The John Birch society, Paul has become a magnet for Neo-Nazis who support him online on sites like Stormfront. Paul even has a picture with the Internets most notorious Neo-Nazis, Don Black and his son Derrek, the founders of Stormfront. Paul also famously refused to give back a donation from Don Black.
Outside the Beltway attempts to defend Paul and, by extension, the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
Much of the piece is guilt by association. Kirchick notes Paul’s long association with the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a respected libertarian think tank, and points out that other people associated with the organization are Confederate sympathizers and the like.
The Ludwig von Mises Institute is at the intellectual forefront of the neo-Confederate movement. It produces reams of libertarian justifications for slavery, while also perpetuating the myth of the Southern states-as-victim. The Civil War, they argue had nothing to do with slavery. It was all about states rights. In other words, and in the mind of the neo-Confederate, the war was about the right for individual states to continue the practice of slavery as well as “tariffs”. In essence, the LvMI rewrites history to suit a particular ideological agenda. Their neo-Misean narrative is intended to lend intellectual gravitas to what is, actually, a Dixiecratic vision. This article is fairly typical.
Immediately following that clause in the Confederate Constitution is a clause that has no parallel in the U.S. Constitution. It affirms strong support for free trade and opposition to protectionism: “but no bounties shall be granted from the Treasury; nor shall any duties or taxes on importation from foreign nations be laid to promote or foster any branch of industry.”
The LvMI believes its strict economic discourse is unassailable. The suggestion is that economics is a neutral ‘science’ that speaks for itself. LvMI’s ‘scholar’ Thomas Di Lorenzo is part of the vanguard in the historical revisionism of the Confederate States of America. Here he says,
Legal scholar Gene Healy has made a powerful argument in favor of abolishing the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. When a fair vote was taken on it in 1865, in the aftermath of the War for Southern Independence, it was rejected by the Southern states and all the border states. Failing to secure the necessary three-fourths of the states, the Republican party, which controlled Congress, passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867 which placed the entire South under military rule
The Fourteenth Amendment is the one that contains what is known as the Citizen Clause. This granted all persons born or naturalized in the United States, regardless of their skin colour, the right to citizenship (The Indians were mysteriously excluded). Prior to this, black people – free and slave – were not considered to be citizens. The amendment is referred to as a “Reconstruction” amendment and was enacted partly in response to the Black Codes of the southern states, which were passed in the wake of the Thirteenth Amendment – which ended slavery – and forbade blacks from voting and holding public office. In this article, Di Lorenzo muddies the waters by introducing the straw man of northern racism. He splits hairs over the Constitution which is, in the mind of the neo-Confederate, an evil document that stole their freedoms away.
The Fourteenth Amendment has had precisely the effect that its nineteenth-century Republican party supporters intended it to have: it has greatly centralized power in Washington, D.C., and has subjected Americans to the kind of judicial tyranny that Thomas Jefferson warned about when he described federal judges as those who would be “constantly working underground to undermine the foundations of our confederated fabric.” It’s time for all Americans to reexamine the official history of the “Civil War” and its aftermath as taught by paid government propagandists in the “public” schools for the past 135 years.
Di Lorenzo presents what appears prima facie to be a reasonable request to examine the history of the Civil War in new light but why stop there? Why not re-examine the Civil War against the backdrop of the entire history of the United States as Howard Zinn has done withThe People’s History of the United States? The answer to that question is because Di Lorenzo and the LvMI have a vested interest in isolating the Civil War from the rest of US history. But notice how he uses quotation marks around the words “Civil War”.
Di Lorenzo’s main body of work orbits the dead star of Abraham Lincoln, whom he and the LvMI regards as a tyrant and a bully. Those of us who are familiar with a broader sweep of history already understand how historical figures are cosmetically-enhanced to offer a media-friendly image of flawed men and women. It happened then and is happening now. Lincoln is not unique. Yet Di Lorenzo labours under the illusion that he and the neo-Confederate movement are the only people to possess such knowledge. And Jefferson Davis? Not a word about him and his poor grasp of military tactics or his slipshod presidency. The Claremont Institute produced a review of Di Lorenzo’s The Real Lincoln in which it says,
As the title suggests, The Real Lincoln purports to go beyond the mountains of revisionist historiography to reveal Lincoln’s genuine principles and purposes. According to DiLorenzo, these had nothing to do with the perpetuation of free government and the problem of slavery: The “real” Lincoln did not care a whit about the “peculiar institution.” At the core of the “real” Lincoln’s ambition was an unqualified and unwavering commitment to mercantilism, or socialism as DiLorenzo sometimes intimates. Lincoln would stop at nothing to impose the “Whig economic system” upon America, and any opinion he voiced regarding slavery was merely instrumental in advancing this end. Lincoln’s “cause,” in the words of DiLorenzo, was “centralized government and the pursuit of empire.” According to DiLorenzo, Lincoln said this “over and over again,” although DiLorenzo does not trouble himself to produce a shred of evidence for this assertion.
If the “real” Lincoln needed to resort to war to advance his cause, he was happy to do it: “Lincoln decided that he had to wage war on the South,” because only military might would destroy “the constitutional logjam behind which the old Whig economic policy agenda had languished.” In the end, writes DiLorenzo, “[Lincoln] wanted war” and “was not about to let the Constitution stand in his way.” Lincoln was devoted to undermining the Constitution in the name of tariffs and internal improvement schemes. In its place Lincoln hoped to build a centralized mercantilist-socialist state, with himself at the helm.
The League of the South recently published its “Declaration of Cultural Secession” advocating a society that advances what it calls the virtues of “Celtic culture,” defined on its Web site as “the permanent things that order and sustain life: faith, family, tradition, community, and private property; loyalty, courage, and honour.” The SPLC lied about and defamed the League of the South by spreading the falsehood on its own Web site that by “Celtic culture” the League of the South means, and I quote, “white people.” Apparently the SPLC believes that only white people embrace family, tradition, community, private property, courage, etc.
Notice the wilful misrepresentation at the end of the paragraph. Di Lorenzo, who is supposed to be some sort of academic, writes in a prose style that’s reminiscent of a petulant correspondent who writes regular letters of complaint to local newspapers. Here he writes of Obama,
It only took the Obama administration a couple of weeks to prove that the national leadership of the Democratic Party is guided by totalitarian-minded socialists who seek to create an omnipotent government. The U.S. government is now controlled by people who have been dreaming of living out their utopian socialist fantasies ever since the fantasies were brought to their attention in college decades ago by their Mao/Castro/Che Guevara poster-hanging, capitalism-hating, communistic professors.
Right libertarians will often use words like “socialist” , “totalitarian” or “America-hating” to describe Obama. Some will question his birth (see the amusingly self-styled ‘Birther’ movement) and claim that he wasn’t born in the US. It’s merely a way of transferring one’s racism over to a narrative about ‘patriotism’.
After reading Barack Obama’s speech at the 100th anniversary of the founding of the NAACP Thursday, there is no getting around it: The man is a racist. He is not a unifier, a healer, or a leader – he divides, incites, destroys. He foments animus and anger. The speech proves, yet again, that he does not (nor does he want to) represent all Americans. He is the most racist, divisive official we have ever elected to any high office, let alone the most powerful office in the world.
Did you see how she inverted the entire argument about racism by claiming that Obama is a ‘racist’? She can’t use the word she wants to use: nigger. It’s a distortion. Like the rest of the ‘birthers’ that she associates herself with, she repeats the worn out canard that Obama is really a Muslim in Christian clothing.
Of course, no Obama speech would be complete without the advancement of Islamic supremacism. He got applause for claiming that “Muslim Americans [are] viewed with suspicion simply because they kneel down to pray to their God.” He made no mention of public Christian prayer (which can get you fired these days).
Every single headline calls Terreblanche a “white supremacist,” alluding to his position in the waning days of the apartheid government, thirty-odd years ago. But the real story here is not that Terreblanche was a “white supremacist” — if he really was (and I know how the left loves to throw around those labels). Whether he was or not, the man was brutally murdered, and I had to go through ten newspaper accounts to find out how he was murdered. The liberal media had to dehumanize him first. And not one newspaper account speaks of Black supremacism — yet that is the really important story in South Africa today. All I see in South Africa is Black supremacism. Terreblanche may have been a white supremacist, but he’s the dead one.
This demonstrates how Geller is disconnected from history . There is no mention of apartheid and the conditions in which South African blacks, Asians and ‘coloureds’ had to suffer. As far as Geller is concerned, all blacks are violent genocidally-inclined criminals
The genocide of Boers taking place in South Africa is never spoken of
What “genocide”? I wonder if she has ever been to South Africa. The fact-free Geller makes it up as she goes along. She clearly overlooks the Afrikaner Weerstandbeweging (AWB) and its veneration of Nazism. For a someone who is supposed to be Jewish, it’s a very odd position to take. Perhaps she’s insane?
In Britain, right libertarians also offer lip service to anti-racism. I say “lip service” because while they claim to be against racism, they will call for certain institutions to be abolished and will excuse an employer’s racism by declaring it a matter of ‘business’.
Barack Obama has an exotic background, and it would be odd if some people weren’t unsettled by it. During the campaign, he made a virtue of his unusual upbringing. He was at once from the middle of the country (Kansas) and from its remotest edge (Hawaii). He was both black and white. He was a Protestant brought up among Muslims. He seemed to have family on every continent. Like St Paul, he made a virtue of being all things to all men.
Was he playing to his gallery of US right libertarians? No doubt about it.
They complain that he has no mandate for the policy of tax, spend and borrow. And they’re right. Look, I supported the fellow, and I still wish him well. But to seek to close down debate with the racism card is pretty low.
Well, I hardly think anyone is “playing the racism card” and even if they are, then they may actually have a valid point. Indeed, it’s easy for someone who isn’t black to make excuses for the tone of language used by Obama’s right wing critics. Like many so-called libertarians, Hannan swats aside any idea that racism may be lurking behind the rhetoric used by the likes of the ‘Birthers’ for example. Incidentally, Hannan later wrote that he was “wrong” about Obama.
Now, I am not accusing Hannan of being a racist. He may be many things but I don’t think he’s necessarily a racist. However his use of the word “exotic” when describing Obama was wrong-headed. The word “exotic” is often applied without much thought and is used to describe someone of a different skin tone. My own background, for instance, is probably more mixed than Obama’s. But why has Hannan overlooked Ron Paul’s racist outbursts? Because he has the right credentials: he’s a small stater. But what Hannan fails to mention is Paul’s love of conspiracy theories. Paul has appeared on Alex Jones radio show to talk about the ‘New World Order’ and the 9/11 ‘Truth’ movement. When people speak about such things, you can’t guarantee that anti-Semitism and racism are following closely behind. The libertarian right are rather fond of conspiracy theories.
Hannan is a member of The Freedom Association, a right wing pressure group that was founded by Ross and Norris McWhirter, who had previously been involved in the Economic League, which worked to blacklist trade unionists and others whom it deemed to be subversive. The McWhirters were also associated with Lady Jane Birdwood, an eccentric right-winger who was closely associated with Britain’s fascists in the 1980’s.
The McWhirters were close personal and political friends. In the mid-1970s she joined forces with Ross McWhirter to produce the far-right magazine Majority. But it was to be a short-lived venture as the project was terminated after Ross McWhirter was killed by the IRA in 1975. Although she fought bitterly to keep the publication going, the trustees opposed such a move.
The recent riots in England have sent the right libertarians scurrying to pen articles attacking black youths, whom have been variously described as “feral”. There is an implication here that black people are genetically pre-disposed to criminality. When television historian and Tudorist, David Starkey blamed the riots on the way people spoke, he unwittingly cast himself in the role of a rather posh Alf Garnett. He deliberately inflamed the situation by quoting Enoch Powell’s infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech. Yet, the Telegraph’s arch-libertarians were quick to defend Starkey claiming that he wasn’t “a racist” and that he was right to single out black youths because of the way they spoke and the music they listened to. They also defended his weird thesis that “whites have become black”.
Toby Young (known as Hon Tobes on this blog) produced this apology, while hiding behind the Oxford Dictionary definition of racism.
To begin with, Starkey wasn’t talking about black culture in general, but, as he was anxious to point out, a “particular form” of black culture, i.e. “the violent, destructive, nihilistic, gangster culture” associated with Jamaican gangs and American rap music. Had he been talking about these qualities as if they were synonymous with African-Caribbean culture per se, or condemning that culture in its totality, then he would have been guilty of racism. But he wasn’t. He was quite specifically condemning a sub-culture associated with a small minority of people of African-Caribbean heritage. (Admittedly, he could have made this clearer.) Rather than being racist, he was merely trotting out the conventional wisdom of the hour, namely, that gang culture is to blame for the riots. The Prime Minister made the same point in the House of Commons on Thursday. (I wrote a blog post on Thursday in which I pointed out the shortcomings of this analysis.)
Tobes, completely and wilfully unaware of 1950’s R&B, rock n roll and death metal rushed to the conclusion that only gangsta rap is a dangerous and corrosive musical form because it celebrates a “violent, destructive, nihilistic, gangster culture”. Perhaps Hon Tobes would like to consider the example of Little Walter’s Boom Boom…Out Go the Lights? Then there’s Marilyn Manson, who has been banned from a number of states as well as Australia because of his image and lyrics. It’s pretty obvious that Tobes also blissfully ignorant of the swaggering misogyny of heavy metal too – the majority of which is played by white musicians.
He then went on to make an almost equally controversial observation about the Labour MP for Tottenham. “Listen to David Lammy, an archetypical successful black man,” he said. “If you turned the screen off so you were listening to him on radio you’d think he was white.”
Owen Jones leapt on this: “You said David Lammy when you heard him sounded white and what you meant by that is that white people equals respectable.”
But I don’t think that is what Starkey meant. Rather, he was simply reiterating the point that he wasn’t condemning African-Caribbean men per se. On the contrary, he was condemning a particular sub-culture, one that may have originated in parts of the African-Caribbean community, but which has now been taken up by some white people as well. Condemning a sub-culture that’s associated with certain people of a particular race, but is embraced by blacks and whites, may be provocative, but it isn’t racist.
But would Hon Tobes be able to identify racism without the aid of the OED? Unlikely. He adds this,
No doubt there’ll be people who take issue with this analysis.
The only problem for Tobes is that his use of the word ‘analysis’ is misleading. This is an apology and a very poor one at that.
The part of the programme which seems to have most got the Left’s goat is the one where David Starkey says that “the whites have become black.” But again, the cultural point he is making is indisputable. Listen to how many white kids (and Asian kids) choose to speak in black street patois; note the extent to which hip hop and grime garage and their offshoots have penetrated the white mainstream; check out how many white kids like to roll like pimps or perps with their Calvins pulled up to their midriffs and their jean waistbands sagging below their buttocks.
This is a posh, middle-class white man speaking in an RP accent. Remember, Delingpole is not only a self-styled climate change sceptic, he’s a batshit mad libertarian who rejects peer-reviewed evidence. Like others of his ilk, he clings fast to conspiracy theories. But people like Young and Delingpole can only see culture in one-dimensional terms. For them, there is a ‘black’ culture as well as a ‘white’ culture. One culture contains an aberrant popular form and the other doesn’t. It’s simple. The cultural cross-fertilization that occurred as a result of immigration is neither here nor there. In fact, it is seen as a corrupting influence and there is no evidence to the contrary that can change their views. After all, wasn’t Grand Theft Auto accused of encouraging people to commit the crimes depicted in the game?
Right libertarians prefer to see things in black and white. The world is a complicated place that is full of complex issues. Yet, these people only want easy answers – hence their love of conspiracy theories. The racists among them lack the honesty to admit to their prejudices. For them, it’s simply a matter of individual rights and if those individual rights include the right to discriminate on the basis of skin colour then it’s simply a matter of ‘business’ and not racism.
The line here seems to be “I’m not a racist, but…”
“Osama bin Laden was killed by US Navy SEALS. He was armed and was brandishing an AK-47. A woman, believed to be one of his wives, was being used a human shield”.
There was only one thing in that statement that is true: bin Laden was killed by US Navy SEALS. The rest of it is rubbish. Within hours of the announcement of bin Laden’s death, a photo was produced that was purported to be that of the newly-deceased Al-Qaeda leader. It was a photoshopped composite of two, possibly more, separate photos. A doctored image that had, apparently been substituted for the real image, which was allegedly “too gruesome” for sensitive Western eyes. Bullshit. We got to see the photos of the expired Saddam Hussein and his gruesome sons. What’s the problem? Aren’t humans, by nature, full of bloodlust? Isn’t that why ‘sports’ like badger-baiting and hare-coursing are still popular with some people? Because we revel in the sight of a blood-spattered being? In spite of what they say, those who go fox-hunting don’t go for the “thrill of the chase” and the stirrup cup (though it helps); they go purely for the denouement. They want to see death.
The assassination of Osama bin Laden in a house in Abbottabad in Pakistan has raised more questions than it has answered. Already, there are conspiracy theories surrounding the life and death of OBL. Is he really still alive and living the life of luxury in Belize? Is he teaching at a school in Dar es Salaam? Or is he working in a chip shop in Batley, West Yorkshire with Elvis Presley as his manager? Or, to pose a more Baudrillardian question, did he ever exist? I’ll leave those questions for those people who listen to the paranoid ramblings of Alex Jones and Jeff Rense ; or those who get a buzz from reading the psychotic prose of lizard-worrier and anti-Semite, David Icke. By far the most important question is how this mission was carried out without the expressed prior approval of the Pakistani government. Such a mission would have been unthinkable in a country like North Korea or China, both of whom would be planning la revanche as I type this. Surely this hit violated every tenet of what passes for international law? Yes? No? So much for co-operation in the “War on Terror” and other abstract nouns. l’alliance: elle est cassé. Pakistan was only ever going to be a junior partner if that…but Pakistan has a nuke. Nonetheless, the Torygraph bloggers are pretty much united: most of them claim that bin Laden’s summary execution was just and that the US had every right to carry it out. Many of them also agree that this event will spawn a million and one conspiracy theories, which they will pin on ‘leftists’. Some of them, like the Hon Tobes, have produced spectacular drivel like this,
If bin Laden had been captured and put on trial, thousands of people would have died at the hands of his terrorist sympathisers. No doubt there will be reprisals in any event, but the terrorist response would have been far greater if bin Laden had been taken alive.
Hmmm, yes, Tobes. The real truth is that The Network (Al-Qaeda to you and me) is in decline. They have had no influence on the events that have taken place during the so-called and ongoing, “Arab Spring”. The suggestion put about by Torygraph bloggers and other self-appointed sages of the Right is that bin Laden’s execution will serve as a bookend. But you’d have to be an idiot to believe that. Tobe’s stablemate, the LMer Brendan O’Neill, on the other hand, comes across like a tuppence ha’penny moral philosopher , O’Neill opines,
And third, these complainers don’t seem to realise that the stakes in war are far higher than they are in law. War is a matter of life and death. It touches upon highly existential issues. It is generally considered acceptable in a war to kill someone whom you believe to be a threat to you, your people or your way of life.
On the same page, gobshite serial commenter and Islamo-obsessive, “danoconnor” chips in like a skipping CD,
The Left feels it has an affinity with Islam because the Left feels it has an affinity with everyone–except its own culture .
The Left thinks that all religions have a few nutters , but don’t worry we’ll take care of that when we have defeated the real enemy –the West .
“danoconnor” is a two-trick pony. He only does Islam and the “Left”. Aren’t you glad you don’t have to drink with him?
Many bloggers and commentators were quick to draw parallels with the Nuremberg War Trials and an imagined war crimes trial of OBL. But it’s lazy stuff that is born of enfeebled minds. It was inevitable that the Nazis would get dragged into this, since the Nazis have become wholly symbolic of pure, undiluted evil. Before the Nazis came along, Satan incarnate came in the shape of Kaiser Wilhelm and before him, the squat figure of Napoleon Bonaparte. Will bin Laden supersede Hitler as the embodiment of evil? More than likely. Make no mistake, OBL is the bogeyman for the 21st century. He is, in death as he was in life, a mythologized creature of spectacular invention: paradoxically, he is at once a dehumanized human being and a monster of gargantuan proportions. He takes his place in the genealogy of unspeakable evil – he is the bastard son of Adolf Schicklegruber. A sort of bastard’s bastard.
The issue of bin Laden’s “burial at sea” is also a bone of contention. The US says that it dumped OBL’s bullet-riddled corpse into the briny because they “didn’t want his grave to become a site of pilgrimage”. Of course this ignores the fact that the Abbottabad compound in which he was slain could easily become a shrine, complete with a souvenir shop selling T-Shirts, mugs and key-rings with OBL’s visage gracing each one.
The mafia and others shoot people in the face so that the deceased’s relatives can’t have an open coffin at the funeral. But OBL was chucked into the deep…. Now there’s something to think about.
…except for the ones that are being worn by the ‘military advisors’. The dispatching of ‘advisors’ is often a prelude to a full-scale war. In the late 1950’s, the US sent advisors to what was then Saigon before the escalation of the Vietnam War in 1965. Truth be told, the US provided more than just “advisors”, there was a sizeable military presence in Vietnam before 1965. Indeed my father was stationed at Tan Son Nhut Air Base in 1963. So when people tell me that the Vietnam War started in 1965, I know better.
This conflict began with so-called “no fly zones”, which are also precursors to a full-blown war. I do find it odd, that within this “no fly zone”, Libyan ground forces are being attacked. I mean, when was the last time you saw a flying tank or a flying howitzer?
We were told that “regime change” was not part of plan in Libya but it seems as though this has been the intention all along. The UN Security Council resolution that authorized the “no fly zones” did not call for regime change but you can bet your bottom dollar that that’s the plan. Scameron wants it. Sokrazy wants it. Even Obomba wants it. Although the public has been told that this “isn’t about oil”, the fact of the matter is that it is about oil. The last time anyone said “this isn’t about oil” was in the run up to the Iraq invasion and guess what? It was about oil. Blair and Bush lied.
So when William Hague tells us that there aren’t any boots on the ground. He’s a liar. There are boots on the ground and there will be more of them.
UPDATE: 2/2/12 @1942
Well, it seems that there were special forces boots on Libya soil as well as those of the very special advisors. I wonder, could there have been more of them? Boots, I mean. Possibly. Anything’s possible.
RT @bethanyusher: I am sick and tired of men who have never done a days manually graft in their life telling manual labourers they can work… 7 hours ago
RT @Warzoid: Millions more hospital patients will die because of this. Forcing sick people to endure covid infections as well in the one pl… 11 hours ago
Guy Debord's Cat 
Telegraph Comment of the Week (#18)
One subject that tends to occupy the minds of the halfwits who leave comments on Telegraph blogs is Barack Obama. These self-styled ‘birthers’ can’t quite believe that the President of the United States is a man with brown skin. Obama’s parentage has been the subject of countless racist conspiracy theories. “He’s a Muslim”, “He’s a communist”, ” “He was born on Mars”.
Like I’ve said many times on this blog I’m not a fan of Obama. He’s shown time and time again that he’s little different to all the other US presidents, especially when it comes to bombing the world’s brown people.
Normally it’s Nile Gardiner who’s obsessed with Obama. If you look at his blogs over the course of the last five years, you will see that most of them are about Obama and how he “hates Britain” or some such nonsense. Thursday, it was the turn of Doc Stanley to provide pieces of rotting meat for the slavering hordes of racists.
That was enough to get extreme headbangers like “Lord Howard Hurts” to leave this coiled-up present on The Doc’s dreadful blog.
This demand to see Obama’s birth certificate is predicated on nothing less than racism. As I’ve pointed out before on this blog: John McCain, who was born outside the United States was never subjected to this kind of demand. Why? Because he’s white. “Lord Arse Hurts” now also claims that Obama’s parents weren’t who they claimed to be. Again this is based on racist notions of racial purity.
I had a look at “Lord Arse’s” blog, which he has laughing titled “freedomfiles” and the language used is characteristically violent. It’s exactly the sort of thing that you’d expect from a Tea Party supporting, gun-toting, racist shit-kicker who lurvs his country.
This talk of being “on the edge of Civil War” reminds me of the kind of language used by self-styled British ‘patriots’ who constantly talk of ‘treason’, ‘genocide’ and ‘race replacement’. “Lord Arse” also believes that he and his ilk are the only people who understand “freedom”. Yet if this person actually bothered to do any research instead of relying wholly on myths, he would see that the “freedom” of which he writes was limited to a certain class of people. Indians and Blacks had no freedom and women couldn’t vote. The working classes were shot and killed when they organized and agitated for better working conditions. “Lord Arse” may talk about “freedom” but he and his class work tirelessly to deny others of their freedoms. In other words, he talks out of his arse.
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Filed under Media, Racism, Telegraph Comment of the Week, Tory press
Tagged as Barack Obama, Birther movement, racism, Telegraph blogs